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Comment by niij | Hacker News Reader

>On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011 based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government.

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I'm not from US and don't fully understand everything that goes on over there, but does this part mean that you can't sue any telecommunications company, just because they have cooperated with the government? How is that sane? Sure, I get it that the company was just following order, but shouldn't you be able to sue the one who made the order in that case? Thinking about it, you should be able to sue people who were blindly following orders, if the following the order means breaking the law.

I guess it means you would have to sue the government.

Which is circular logic. To sue an entity which you fund is to indrectly sue yourself.

What? No. You can sue your employee after all.

When suing in a case like this, punitive damages would be paid out of the governments budget, rather than the personal assets of those personally responsible, correct?

Yes Alan Watts, everything is connected, but organizations and people can still remain distinct and have different motivations. :)

You can't sue the US government for this without its permission.

Correct! Sovereign immunity.

You can read about the ongoing suits that followed Hepting v. AT&T, on EFF's case page: https://eff.org/nsa/ . The timeline is also worth a look: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

(Disclosure: I work at EFF)

Yes, the applicable statutory immunity grant (FISA Amendments Act Section 802) is very broadly-worded. There was a follow-up case, Jewel v. NSA, that sued the NSA directly for issuing those orders. That case is ongoing: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/jewel-v-nsa-moves-forw....

Yes, but remember, people like Klein and Snowden are traitors working on the payroll of the Russians against US interests, and...

Man, I can't even make this stuff up.

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